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Coups offer pyrrhic victory but those who suffer them usually had it coming
Author, Benjamin Rukwengye. PHOTO/FILE.
What you need to know:
Like dopamine, they seem to serve an immediate high for nationals who might have endured years and sometimes decades of transgressions, oppression...
About two years ago, the Africa Report published an interesting story about Pascaline Bongo Ondimba, daughter of Gabon’s former dictator, Omar Bongo Ondimba. Apparently, as a student in the United States, she had met and started an affair with the great Bob Marley. Their affair lasted until the reggae superstar died a few months later.
Pascaline convinced the Wailers to perform in Libreville on her father’s birthday. It was an exciting proposition and they immediately bought in. Despite waxing lyrical about the motherland, the Wailers had never stepped foot on the continent. This was everything they had ever wanted. Bongo had also recently won re-election with a mindboggling 99.96 percent.
Daddy Bongo himself wasn’t very enthused about hanging out with the Rastas. Their hairstyles and weed-smoking were a little too much for the Black Frenchman image he was desperate to project and maintain. Instead, he delegated the hosting responsibilities to his son and heir apparent, Ali Bongo.
As guests of the state, they were shown around and taken to all the best places around the modern capital. But they also got to see the other parts of the country, outside of the glamour and glitz that is paid for by oil and only accessible to a handful of the inner political and business circle.
The trip is revealing. They are bewildered at the inequality. They realised that Gabon is still a colonial country ruled by a black man. The older Bongo would stick around till death for an extra 29 years – having ruled for 42 years – before Junior Bongo took over in 2009. By that time, his influence had stretched so far as to offer campaign funding to candidates in other countries – including France.
Gabon, for all its oil wealth, is also one of the most unequal countries. The wealthy are wealthy, often a very small percentage, usually members of the first family or those connected to them, and as you would expect, foreign. The poor suffer what they must. It is the story of most African countries.
Fast-forward to August 2016. Junior Bongo has been in power for about 7 years and is facing an election that he might lose. His competitor is a certain Jean Ping, the former chairperson of the African Union Commission and a longtime minister in his father’s government. Interestingly, he is also an in-law of sorts, having sired two children with Pascaline.
As the votes come in, it is increasingly looking like Ali Bongo will lose. Somehow, he engineers one that gets him out of the bind and buys him another presidential term. His family’s stronghold is the Haut-Ogooue province, and it hasn’t sent its votes yet. When they finally come in, the math is for the Book of Records. 99 percent of the registered voters in the province turned up, and 95 percent of them voted for Ali Bongo. He wins by a mere 6,000 votes.
As expected, the opposition protested, Jean Ping declared himself President, but he didn’t have many sympathisers because as the immediate head of the African Union, he had done little to help countries when citizens and opposition parties cried out to the continental body for help in similar situations. In the ensuing weeks, his supporters get arrested, beaten up and some even killed.
This week, Ali appears to have lost power in a military coup that is bringing a surrealistic ending to 55 years of the Bongo dynasty. In a shabbily recorded phone video on social media, he was urging friends in the international community to “make noise.” It makes for good irony because, in 2016, when the international community condemned the dubious electoral process that had handed him victory, Bongo is quoted to have dismissed them, saying that he isn’t accountable to the international community. The international community better stay muted.
It is not a fad that West African countries are resorting to coups – problematic as they might be – to solve socioeconomic and political questions and contradictions. If you picked a random African country, you are more likely than not, to find one where the President and his family behave like a monarchy and think of the citizens as subjects and servants.
That is the prism within which the phenomena of coups can be contextualised. Like dopamine, they seem to serve an immediate high for nationals who might have endured years and sometimes decades of transgressions, oppression, and exploitation and given up on chances of systemic and constitutional change.
Mr Rukwengye is the founder, Boundless Minds.
@Rukwengye
